


handfuls of honey

by Aris



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Angst, Blood, Character Study, Gen, Male Miqo'te (Final Fantasy XIV), Male Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Nightmares
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26782027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: between everything else, there are quieter moments, some soft, some sickly, some silly(fleance Doing His Best to keep his tiny little catboy brain together while adventuring, with a few helping hands)
Relationships: Damien Vanih & Fleance Lyrhiri, Warrior of Light & Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	handfuls of honey

_ The forest twists before his eyes, its leaves now red, its bark darkened to scabs, grass bleeding at every footfall. A bird calls, black, and it is gone when he looks for it once more. _

_ Its voice is pitched to honey, and it calls his old name beneath a song. _

_ He turns. _

_ Y’vafs ears are downturned. He is picking the grass like a bored child, and his hands are stained to his wrists in their sickly dew. Beneath his breath, he is murmuring something he can not quite hear. He knows it is important. _

_ Fleance steps forward, a tree cracks in the distance, and the bird pecks at Y’vaf’s empty eyes, his body slumped against a log. The bird cocks his head at his gaze, it asks: _

_ “Why did you run, Seda’a?” _

  
  
  


With a start, he awakes, the empty echo of a sweet birds song following him to the crumpled reality of his bedsheets. He is upright, though he has no recollection of sitting up, and while a blank wall confronts his eyes he cannot see it for the thoughts that barrage him, uncollectable and incoherent in their nature. Fleance struggles for a hold on them, but they slip from him like so much dust.

There is a coldness at his breast, and, as the air settles about him, a slow and dawning sense of horror.

Again. The same nightmare, again.

He breathes out, and glances to his side. The space Damien had once lain is now empty, and though any other night it would be a cause for concern, Fleance can feel only tepid relief. There was enough upon their shoulders, he could not bear it if he were to be another. Damon could rarely sleep, as it was.

Or would not.

Sometimes, he appears to deem it too futile to even try.

Quietly, Fleance pushes the blankets to his feet, and pulls his knees to his chest, his tail coming to rest against him. It is still night, judging from the black pulling at the glass, and the slow drizzle of rain can be heard tapping against the window. It’s calming in the very smallest of ways, and he tucks his face away behind his knees to hide from the vastness of nothing that opens up along the seams of his mind.

He feels, often, that there is a ditch to the side of his memory. One that runs alongside the road of his thoughts, a constant upturning of dirt and rock. It is so deep that, from where he walks upon the middle, he can not see its bottom. The sides are sometimes steep and sharp, other times muddy and soft, the imprints of a well-worn path printed upon the steady decline. No matter from which cardinal the sun shines, shadows play at its brim, sepia, or dark, but always shifting uneasily.

Fleance cannot deny its draw.

When there is nothing ahead, nothing on which to fixate and set towards, there are only these shadows, this ditch. They beckon at the sides of his vision, a cut on the lining of his mouth he cannot ignore. Boredom is worse than pain, and he will push his nails into his palms as he waits, bite at his lips in the lulling interims, focus on the dull, bruising pain of blisters upon a long journey.

In truth, Fleance can not stand the pain.

He hates it. The ache. The itching of healing. The cloying choke of blood spilt, how it slips to every crevice, how it dries syrupy, then flaky, how it sticks, and coats, and fills his head with copper. How it never washes off the first time, hands shaking, how, he can scrub, and scratch, and tear, and there is always more of it. Just beneath the surface.    
  
There is a sweat at his brow still, but he cannot bring himself to raise his hands to his eye level to wipe it away. Instead, he brings up his head and stares, hard, at where condensation has caught at the side of the window.

Though his thoughts are still scattered, he believes fervently that anything is better than what lies in these ditches.

But - the middle of his palms tingle, and he cannot help but tongue at the wound. Prick at the blister. To wonder in so stare, to see how far the darkness falls. He can’t help but think- but think -

\- that the worst thing about it, is that they had all been so young.

There are plenty of horrible, stifling details about that day, the one that flocks often to his sleep - the spilling of blood, the surprising pliability of skin, how their armour had sucked the light in like carefully structured fragments of void. He remembers best the moment before, where the birds had sang sweetly, and the petrioche had greeted his nose, and the moment after, when the bodies of his comrades had settled into the ground.

Growing up in the Twelveswood had accustomed him to the sight of death, such is the necessity of such a place. There too, amongst the trees and moss and sunlight, had there been life, connected with its brethren eternally, a give and a take, the balancing of a scale.

He flexes his fingers, and beneath his feet, the dirt crumbles.

Y’vaf had brown hair. The kind that could oft be mistaken for ginger, in the right kind of sunlight, the kind that caught ones eyes, that beckoned forth softness, gentleness. It had been that kind of moment, the one before, where Fleance had met his eye, and smiled.

Of course, Y’vaf was already dead, by then.

He was seventeen. It was not his first patrol. He died, anyway, the bards and the poets be damned, and the scale tipped, and his eyes emptied, and he reached out from the floor as if there was a damned thing Fleance could do to help him.

Shadows drip down his fingers, sickly, tar-like, and Fleance is knee-deep in this ditch, this darkness. Breaths pull from his chest as if a staggered, wounded, deer. He raises his hands to see them, to catch the blood, but the shadows swim between his fingers, and his palms itch, and the room is too hot, and too cold.

Blood.

It had bled from his stomach, at first, where the blade had pierced him from behind. Then, from his face, when he had turned his head, running, and crying, to see how close the reaper pulls.

Fleance staggers for the sink, and beneath the light of a flickering candle his hands shake. Dark, and then light, clean, and then dirtied. Something hysterical rises at the brim of his chest, and he considers pressing the lick of the flame against his skin, just to make sure, this time.

There are plenty of other horrible, stifling details, ones which burn themselves to his eyelids, once which, now, after all this time, he is unsure of. For they come to him only in the quiet moments, between dreams, between conversations. When he sits alone in the shade of a great tree, and the sting of gunpowder and burning catches his nose, when a lilt to a voice catches at his heart in a sickeningly familiar trapping, when there is nothing and everything to pay at his mind, to occupy his senses --

The water runs clear. 

He crumples to the floor.

The worst thing about it is that Y’vaf was so young, that Taurex had children at home, that Arlont and Zoulitte had been raising their weapons even as Fleance dropped his. That he had not been able to move, could only stare at his bloody hands as they dripped, and poured, as what was left of Y’vaf spilled out between the gaps of his fingers, their shaking digits bracketing his strewn corpse.

The worst thing, when everything else has dulled, has lessened in it’s shrieking, pulsing, horror, is that he had survived.

And they had not.

It should, by all rights, have been him.

He doesn’t hear the gentle click of the door, nor the rustle of footsteps, but his name, called softly, as if the beginning of a lullaby, is unmistakable.

Damien. Of course.

His hands are clean. He knows they’re clean, because the water had run clear, and he had not taken his eyes off since. He wants to look up, to greet Damien, but the moment feels estranged. Elongated. His plan, from when they had first met, had been not to worry Damien senselessly with his dramatics, with this wound at his side that would not close, but he  _ cannot _ drag his gaze away.

Is it there, the blood?

Is it ever  _ truly  _ gone?

Aware of his presence now, he hears Damien approach, the careful procession of his steps deliberately loud. From his peripheral, a hand reaches out, and Fleance tenses in anticipation.

Damien pauses, the curl of the proffered limb seeking permission.

After a moment, he manages a node, short and jilted.

The touch is cold from the outside air, an arrow to the fog, but no less comforting as it smooths down his arm to rest at his wrist. Behind the path of Damien’s palm, his skin breaks out into slight goosebumps, chasing the brief touch.

His companion murmurs something, quiet enough his ears twitch up in strain, and a few caught sentiments break free his wintry freeze, familiar in their candor. Something more than bland comfort weaved between them. He looks up, for a moment, to catch just a second of those blue, blue eyes, to pursue the words secreted away between them - and is met with the warmness of a spring oasis, lapping tranquilly at their shared shoreline. 

It fills him.

“What -“, he starts, but finds his voice embarrassingly strained, struggling to clear past his throat, “What did you say?”

Damien slides his hand down over his, and when Fleance glances to their entanglement, he spies no blood set free. Nothing to dirty his friends hands, as his are.

“Better?” Damien asks, instead of answering.

Fleance flexes his hand in his grip, slides his fingers tighter between Damiens’. Between the hand washing, and Damien’s time in the rain, the hold is slick and damp, yet, somehow pleasant. A reassurance become physical, the manifestation of all the comforts of home, the giddiness of persistence, grounding, presence.

He meets Damiens’ eyes again, finds the softness there that is shaped for him. His gloves are on the bedside table, where he always keeps them - but for now, this is enough.

Perhaps, more than enough.

“Better.” He agrees.

  
  


((

  
  
  


_ “Listen to my voice,” Esteem had said, “listen to my heartbeat.” _

_ “Come back,” and Damien had. Again and again, to those words pressed against his raw soul, and now it is these inscriptions upon himself, these unwound seals, he speaks, too, to the crumpled man before him. An eye for an eye. A hand, offered, for a hand, held. _

_ “Come back.” He pleads upon the wooden floor, _

_ And soft ambers answer his call. _

  
  


))

**Author's Note:**

> i finally have a place to drop lil fleance moments! hell yeah
> 
> i have borrowed damien from dani, and you can read more of our boyos together in [her fics](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26758651/chapters/65278423) which are chef kiss. DO read,
> 
> comments are MUCH appreciated, and u can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/insalte)


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